The New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times and Indie Bound Bestseller

'Those who like to insist that blood is always thicker than water should read Inheritance, and let their own hearts slowly and gently expand.'-- The Observer

'All my life I had known there was a secret. What I hadn't known: the secret was me.'

In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. Everything she had believed about her identity was a lie.

Shapiro's parents had died when she was in her twenties. With only a handful of figures on a webpage, Shapiro sets out to discover the truth about herself and her history.

Inheritance is a genetic detective story; a memoir that reads like a thriller. It is a book about secrets -secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.

"Giovanni Ruscitti has written a wonderful book of special relevance for all North and South Americans whose ancestors have migrated from Asia, Europe, and Africa. His journey to the land of his forefathers is so meaningful not only because of the discovery of what connects us 'Americanos' to the rest of the world but also the journey within. A trip in which we all feel recognized. Bravo maestro!" -Hernando de Soto, finalist for Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, and author of Mystery of Capital Amazon #1 Bestseller Cobblestones, Conversations, and Corks is a passionate and deeply moving story about a father-son relationship; a culture rooted in family, food and wine; and an ancestral small town in Central Italy that was left behind after World War II. On November 11, 1943, the Nazis invaded Cansano, forcing its two thousand inhabitants to make a tough decision-fight and be killed or sent to a POW camp, stay behind as servants to the Nazis, or move into the unforgiving mountains of Abruzzo while the Nazis used their village as a home base. Giovanni Ruscitti's family chose the latter and spent the next few months living in horrendous winter conditions in the rugged mountains. When the war ended, they returned to a village so ravaged by the Nazis that, today, the town has less than two hundred citizens and remains in a dilapidated state. In this memoir, Ruscitti visits Cansano for the first time with his family, including parents Emiliano and Maria. As he walks Cansano's cobblestones, his father's stories and life are illuminated by the town piazza, the steep valley, and the surrounding mountains. He relives the tales of his parents' struggles during World War II, their extreme post-war misery and poverty, their budding romance after, and their decision to immigrate to the US in search of the American Dream. Ruscitti's adventure is not just an exploration of his homeland but reveals what family, culture, wisdom, and love really means. And what our heritage really tells us about who we are.

"The book is a treasure house of immensely informative material. . . . An important addition to the small body of English-language works on the conditions of late Tokugawa society, told at a very human level."--Comparative Studies in Society and History

Whether your ancestor left hundreds of acres of land, money, or a few modest belongings, the records created when those legacies were distributed can provide valuable clues to family connections, relationships, and just how your ancestors lived.

"Inheritance in Ontario" will help you determine whether your relative's will was proved in the Court of Probate, surrogate courts, or another court, and navigate the finding aids to locate surviving estate files and other complementary records at the Archives of Ontario, local courthouse or archives, or through "FamilySearch.org." Not every Ontario estate was handled by a court, however, and land records, newspapers, and manuscript collections can also help you discover "who got what."

This fully revised second edition of Chris Paton's best-selling guide is essential reading if you want to make effective use of the internet in your family history research. Every day new records and resources are placed online and new methods of sharing research and communicating across cyberspace become available, and his handbook is the perfect introduction to them. He has checked and updated all the links and other sources, added new ones, written a new introduction and substantially expanded the social networking section. Never before has it been so easy to research family history using the internet, but he demonstrates that researchers need to take a cautious approach to the information they gain from it. They need to ask, where did the original material come from and has it been accurately reproduced, why was it put online, what has been left out and what is still to come? As he leads the researcher through the multitude of resources that are now accessible online, he helps to answer these questions. He shows what the internet can and cannot do, and he warns against the various traps researchers can fall into along the way.

THIS HEARTBREAKING, HEARTWARMING, TRUE STORY FOLLOWING THE HISTORY OF A FAMILY IN WALES IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS EVER WRITTEN. 'I am a proud supporter of our National Health Service which has shown yet again what an important and valued institution it is in the UK. As the first NHS baby through to her work today, Aneira's story shows her dedication and passion for protecting this phenomenal service for future generations.' KEIR STARMER 'This book speaks from the heart about a passion to preserve our NHS - as powerful a symbol of goodness as we have. Nye's own experience and that of her family represents our deep need to fight for a society where all are equal in worth and value. And how the NHS stands fast as a symbol of equality, of fairness, and of compassion for all.' MICHAEL SHEEN 'Aneira has written a memoir which is a deeply personal, richly researched and incredibly timely tribute to Britain's commitment to provide free and equal healthcare to all.' - DAILY MAIL Book of the Week, 22 May 2020 'Moving tribute to the NHS.' - WI Life _____________________________________________________________ 'Edna,' says the doctor, coming to stand beside her bed. 'You need to wait. It's not long now. Don't push. Just hold on, Edna!' The birth of the National Health Service coincided with the birth of one little girl in South Wales: Aneira 'Nye' Thomas, the first baby delivered by the NHS. This is the touching story of Nye's family - their loves and losses - and the launch of a treasured public service that has touched the lives of every family in the nation.

Part One of this large format book will enable you to collect information for your family tree simply by talking to people, and provides a series of beautiful fill-in charts to permanently record a family tree of up to five generations. Part Two contains information on Irish family history and includes advice for those who want to proceed further with this fascinating hobby. The Ancestor Album is the ideal book for the beginner. If you don't want to do the family tree yourself give it to the kids and get them to do it.

In his haunting debut, Water and Sky, published in 2014, Neil Sentance explored the history of his family and the landscape which shaped them. Ridge and Furrow continues the project to chart in prose the voices of a seldom recorded people and place. From the long shadows of war and want, to facing the great changes to rural life in the twentieth century, to first forays into a world beyond the flatlands of Lincolnshire, the book delicately portrays the dreams of lone, and often lonely, figures in one family's history. Ridge and Furrow melds memoir and fiction, place and nature writing, told with characteristic lyricism and muddy realism.

Germans to America provides both genealogists and researchers of family history with the first extensive, indexed source of German surname immigrants. This entire project was planned to span the years 1850 through 1893, but now the series has been extended. The series reproduces information from the original passenger lists filed by all vessels entering U.S. ports from abroad. Ships that departed from German ports or carried passengers who declared themselves to be of German origin are included, with first and last names, age, sex, occupation, and province and village of origin (whenever available) provided for each emigrant. A complete index of names is included at the end of every volume. Germans to America may be ordered by individual volume. Standing orders, which receive a 10% discount, are also welcomed.

Germans to America provides both genealogists and researchers of family history with the first extensive, indexed source of German surname immigrants. This entire project was planned to span the years 1850 through 1893, but now the series has been extended. The series reproduces information from the original passenger lists filed by all vessels entering U.S. ports from abroad. Ships that departed from German ports or carried passengers who declared themselves to be of German origin are included, with first and last names, age, sex, occupation, and province and village of origin (whenever available) provided for each emigrant. A complete index of names is included at the end of every volume. Germans to America may be ordered by individual volume. Standing orders, which receive a 10% discount, are also welcomed.

An unputdownable tale of one man's quest to recover his family's property, plundered by the Nazis. Menachem Kaiser's brilliantly told story is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather's former battle to reclaim the family's property in Sosnowiec, Poland. Here, he meets a Polish lawyer known as 'The Killer' who agrees to take his case and becomes involved with a band of Silesian treasure-seekers, all the while piecing together his family's complex history. Propelled by rich, original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to seize your own legacy? Can reclaimed property repair rifts among the living? Plunder is both a deeply immersive adventure story and an irreverent, daring interrogation of inheritance - material, spiritual, familial, and emotional.

Record Your Family History! From the editors of Family Tree Magazine, this workbook makes it easy to record and organize your family history. Family Tree Memory Keeper helps you keep track of basic genealogy information and special family memories, including traditions, heirloom histories, family records, newsworthy moments, family migrations and immigrations, old recipes, important dates, and much more. This book features: Dozens of fill-in pages to record all your essential family information. Convenient paperback format for writing and photocopying pages. Space for mounting photographs. Maps to mark your family's migration routes. Tips for researching your family history. A comprehensive list of additional resources. Use Family Tree Memory Keeper to log your genealogy research. Bring it to family get-togethers to gather and share information. Create an invaluable record of your ancestry for future generations.

The Kahans from Baku is the saga of a Russian Jewish family. Their story provides an insight into the history of Jews in the Imperial Russian economy, especially in the oil industry. The entrepreneur and family patriarch, Chaim Kahan, was a pious and enlightened man and a Zionist. His children followed in his footsteps in business as well as in politics, philanthropy, and love of books. The book takes us through their forced migration in times of war, revolution, and the twentieth century's totalitarian regimes, telling the story of fortune and misfortune of one cohesive family over four generations through Russia, Germany, Denmark, and France, and finally on to Palestine and the United States of America.

Can trauma be inherited? It is this question that sets Alex Halberstadt off on a quest to name and acknowledge a legacy of family trauma, and to end a cycle of estrangement that had endured for nearly a century. His search takes him across the troubled, enigmatic land of his birth. In Ukraine he tracks down his paternal grandfather - most likely the last living bodyguard of Joseph Stalin - to reckon with the ways in which decades of Soviet totalitarianism shaped and fractured three generations of his family. He returns to Lithuania, his Jewish mother's home, to revisit the legacy of the Holocaust and the pernicious anti-Semitism that remains largely unaccounted for, learning that the boundary between history and biography is often fragile and indistinct. And he visits his birthplace, Moscow, where his glamorous grandmother designed homespun couture for Soviet ministers' wives, his mother dosed dissidents at a psychiatric hospital, and his father made a living by selling black-market jazz and rock records. Finally, Halberstadt explores his own story: that of a fatherless immigrant who arrived in America, to a housing project in Queens, New York, as a ten-year-old boy struggling with identity, feelings of rootlessness and a yearning for home. He comes to learn that he was merely the latest in a lineage of sons who grew up alone, separated from their fathers by the tides of politics and history. As Halberstadt revisits the sites of his family's formative traumas, he uncovers a multigenerational transmission of fear, suspicion, melancholy, and rage. And he comes to realize something more: nations, like people, possess formative traumas that penetrate into the most private recesses of their citizens' lives.

Jonathan Scott's Family History Web Directory is an information-packed reference guide that distils the best of the internet into one easy-to-use format. Themed sections cover different topics, from 'getting started' to specific occupations, and there is an index reproducing all the websites in A-Z order. His handbook is a vital source for less experienced researchers, and a handy aide-memoire for more seasoned campaigners. Web addresses are listed by topic, then in order of importance and usefulness. An extraordinary range of sites that will interest family historians is included - from records of births and deaths, tax, crime and religion, to military records and records of work and occupations. Also featured are sites that give information about archives, blogs and forums, social networking and sharing research. The internet can be an overwhelming place for the genealogist. Jonathan Scott's book provides readers with online shortcuts, tips for getting the best from well-known websites, plus the details of all kinds of lesser-known and hard-to-find sources.

Family history should reveal more than facts and dates, lists of names and places - it should bring ancestors alive in the context of their times and the surroundings they knew - and research into local history records is one of the most rewarding ways of gaining this kind of insight into their world. That is why Jonathan Oates's detailed introduction to these records is such a useful tool for anyone who is trying to piece together a portrait of family members from the past. In a series of concise and informative chapters he looks at the origins and importance of local history from the sixteenth century onwards and at the principal archives - national and local, those kept by government, councils, boroughs, museums, parishes, schools and clubs. He also explains how books, photographs and other illustrations, newspapers, maps, directories, and a range of other resources can be accessed and interpreted and how they can help to fill a gap in your knowledge.As well as describing how these records were compiled, he highlights their limitations and the possible pitfalls of using them, and he suggests how they can be combined to build up a picture of an individual, a family and the place and time in which they lived.

Jean Barr opens the antique chest she inherited from her great-great-uncle Alexander and unravels the strands of his life as an evangelical Presbyterian minister in late nineteenth century Italy, unpacking the cover-ups in Britain's history of Empire, and bringing to light the ingenious but ordinary ways in which a handful of families, even today, continue to shore up their wealth. She uncovers a series of marriages that placed Alexander within shouting distance of a network of powerful families stretching over generations, families whose staying power has been rooted in hoarding and passing on land and capital. This is the backdrop to Alexander's extraordinary life. It enabled him to flourish in Italy and, in his final years, to become a cheerleader for a dictator. The Legacy: A Memoir is a telling of family history as world history.

The German bestseller - a powerful and deeply affecting graphic memoir that explores identity, guilt and the meaning of home Winner of Moira Gemmill Illustrator of the Year Winner of Book Illustration prize at the V&A Illustration Awards Winner of the The National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography Winner of the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing Shortlisted for the Longman History Today Prize One of the Guardian's '50 Biggest Books of Autumn 2018' The New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018 Nora Krug grew up as a second-generation German after the end of the Second World War, struggling with a profound ambivalence towards her country's recent past. Travelling as a teenager, her accent alone evoked raw emotions in the people she met, an anger she understood, and shared. Seventeen years after leaving Germany for the US, Nora Krug decided she couldn't know who she was without confronting where she'd come from. In Heimat, she documents her journey investigating the lives of her family members under the Nazi regime, visually charting her way back to a country still tainted by war. Beautifully illustrated and lyrically told, Heimat is a powerful meditation on the search for cultural identity, and the meaning of history and home.

Lavishly illustrated with images and stunning photographs from private collections and spanning three generations, delve into the history of Thomas Clark and his family... Rising from obscure beginnings to become a gentleman in the Victorian age dominated by the class system, as a merchant, Thomas was importing exotic produce from around the globe into the City of London. The diaries of his daughter Matilda throw open a window onto the stresses and strains of family life, showing a stereotypical Victorian father (including the bad temper). Follow his eldest son through his artistic endeavours as a lecturer, writer, poet and artist. There is a shift of perspective on his authoritarian father; here is a devoted family man who adored his wife and spent time with his family. A man dedicated to both science and religion in a world in which he found some new teachings objectionable as an evangelical non-conformist Protestant. Finally, the life stories of his children unfold, including the author's grandfather; they were born into privilege but transcended the modern world which saw social change. Moving recollections of lives lived up to the 1950s from children, grandchildren and local residents are revealed. Read these fascinating tales, including that of the great-uncle who appears to have made an important invention, which played a significant role in winning the Great War - but perhaps someone else ended up claiming the credit? A fascinating and readable saga of the highest order. John Titford MA FSA

The "classic" introduction to the study of German personal names is now re-available in a completely revised and updated version. It provides a popular overview of the variety of aspects, questions and research findings in the field and opens up perspectives for further research. This introductory work is aimed at students and teachers in higher education, but is also of interest to school teachers and general readers.